At the Jackson Hole History Museum, Camille Morineau blended her inclusive feminist retelling of art history through a territorially specific lens. Photo: Valerie Archeno

“There are a lot of important female artists… the only problem is finding information about them,” French curator and art historian Camille Morineau once told the Institut Français. Her fatigue at seeing women artists being overlooked prompted her to create the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (AWARE), a nonprofit dedicated to championing female artists through conferences, symposiums and an ever-growing online reference database. She has made a career of bringing women into the conversation within art historical discourses and institutions alike. Per Morineau, the fallacy of women’s absence from art history reflects their lack of visibility on the record, not their actual dearth.

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In this spirit, Morineau recently spearheaded the exhibition “Women of the American West: Trailblazers at the Turn of the 20th Century.” On view at the Jackson Hole History Museum through July 12, 2025, it acts as an art historical corrective and introduces the work of five exceptional Midwestern women artist/rancher hybrids at the turn of the 20th Century: two photographers (Evelyn Cameron and Lora Webb Nichols) and three painters (Fra Dana, Josephine Hale, Elizabeth Lochrie). These women disrupt the clichéd American West mythology so tethered to inflated masculinity.

Morineau—who pursued gender studies in the U.S. and loves the novels of Cormac McCarthy—blended her inclusive feminist retelling of art history through a territorially specific lens. She selected the five artists for the quality of their work and their non-average life stories. They all lived in American territories that had granted women the right to vote in 1869, in what would become Wyoming (that is to say, long before the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1920). Note that it wasn’t a progressive gesture; it was motivated by a racist imperative to spur white procreation, to rival the Native American population.

Observer spoke with Morineau in her Paris office about the necessity of research to expand gendered artistic references, travel as a form of liberation and hardy Midwestern endurance.

Paint me a picture of “Women of the American West.”

The museum itself is rather small, but it’s a gem, really beautiful. It’s right in the center of Jackson Hole, in the midst of amazing scenery. We’ve got the Rockies on two sides. On the first floor, there’s a dense history of Jackson Hole as a community: lots of Native American objects, to pay homage to the first inhabitants of the land,........

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